In addition to the exhibition at Glasgow's Common Guild, Ondak will also perform his 1999 performance piece 'This Way, Please'

If things go in cycles, Slovakian artist Roman Ondak isn't shy about encouraging and manipulating such dizzying turns of events. Where previously he has had museum-goers mark their height on gallery walls and broken down national barriers at the Venice Biennale by having plants grow through the Slovak pavilion, for his first show in Scotland things look a lot more personal.

Ondak will present a series of still lifes he painted as a teenager, placing them beside the original object the work was taken from. While on one level this smacks of middle-aged show-and-tell, there are, according to Common Guild curator Kitty Anderson, more discreetly political and philosophical intentions behind the display.

‘I like the idea of exposing parts of the past which are not normally seen,’ she says, ‘but there's also this idea about loops and cycles that keep on filtering into Ondak's work, endlessly returning to the same place.’

To coincide with Some Thing, Ondak will present 'This Way, Please', a performance piece first seen in 1999 and which will be staged at GOMA.

New work by the Slovakian conceptual artist whose Measuring the Universe – in which the plain white gallery space is marked with the height and name of each visitor, until over time a pattern emerges – was an unexpected popular hit at New York's MoMA in 2007. This exhibition contains paintings and drawings made by the…